This little electric car was made in the mid-90s. It offered a 20-kW electric motor and 11-kWh NiCd battery that provided range about 80-100 km. This particular vehicle was recently upgraded with a 3-phase on-board AC charger (up to 12kW) and a BMW i3 Li-Ion battery offering 28 kWh of usable energy and range about 200-250 km per charge.
It is fascinating how much the technology evolved. Peugeot 106 had top speed just 90 km/h and although its motor offered up to 20 kW of power, you should not exceed 11 kW for a longer period. Otherwise you could damage the motor.
Drive mode selector is implemented the simplest way I’ve ever seen. There is no Parking or Neutral mode. You just have a button in the center console that switches between going forward and backward.
There are not many laptops that can offer worse experience of replacing a hard drive. I got this T3200SX from a friend of mine and he gave me also a 120MB Conner hard drive. The machine itself had a working 40MB Conner drive, but I decided that it would be nice to have more disk space. I thought that it could take just a few minutes in a machine of this size… but I was wrong.
The hard drive replacement involves dismantling the lid, peeling off the LED board labels and removing the gas-plasma screen. Once you do all of this, you can finally remove the top cover and access the hard drive. The screws holding the drive are nicely hidden behind cables and connectors that block access to them. I think the whole process took me 30-40 minutes, but at least I was successful. This was even a bit worse that replacing a hard drive in a 12-inch iBook G4 (which is also very painful).
The already installed drive (in a different machine) could not boot. My T3200SX has an older BIOS version that does not know the 120MB drive. Thankfully, there is the ANYDRIVE utility, so I was able to install the BIOS overlay in the drive’s MBR and everything is working now (btw if you install ANYDRIVE on a drive that has only one partition that uses all the space on the drive, you can install the utility without losing the data, even though this is not mentioned in the README file).
My T3200SX has just 3MB of RAM (1MB on-board, 2x1MB in SIMMs). You might think that I can upgrade it easily with any standard SIMM, but that is not true. The machine is very picky, and it fires an “extended parity error” with every module I tried. So, although the computer has six standard memory slots, I must stick with 3MB of memory. The machine specs are: 16-MHz Intel 386SX, 3MB RAM, 120MB HDD, 640×480 gas-plasma display… the two ISA slots are empty and waiting for a network interface and a sound card.
I recently acquired a shiny Model 100 portable with necessary accessory. I played a bit with the machine before cleaning it and I was a bit surprised that it could retain data in the RAM disk for minutes after disconnecting the power. That gave me the impression that there was a backup battery inside, which scared me enough to open the machine immediately… and yes, although the battery still provided some voltage, it started destroying itself and the computer. I removed the residue from both the backup battery and the battery compartment for AA cells and cleaned the rest of the machine. It looks almost like new now.
I have to say that I am very impressed with the Model 100. The user experience is closer to professional computers of that time than home 8-bit machines. The programs in ROM can read/write the same files, switching between them is fast and there is even a shared clipboard. I particularly like the built-in terminal emulator with handy access to download/upload features and easy configuration. This was a true mobile companion for those working on the road and accessing the company minicomputer over modem.
My version does not have the modem, but at least the null-modem communication works flawlessly. I think I should install an old UNIX somewhere and try accessing it like in the old days. Somebody even created a Model 100 termcap definition file, so it is possible to use control functions of its terminal emulator in UNIX.
A guy contacted me that he found a complete TRS-80 Model 100 at the recycling center, ready to be destroyed. He was not a vintage computer collector but realized that it could have value for some, so he started to google somebody who can appreciate it and found my Czech blog. He wrote me a message that I could take it for free if I was interested.
… and I indeed was. This particular machine travelled to our country during the socialism era and it is quite rare here. I love portable computers of all kinds, so I am very curious to see whether this 1983 ultra-mobile machine was just a useless toy or a valuable companion on the road. The next step is to clean everything. The original suitcase started to disintegrate, and everything is covered with the black filth.
In the mid-1990s, there were so many articles about how cheap all the RISC CPUs were compared to what Intel offered. You could read it in an every computer-related magazine every month. Scientist friends of mine at universities desperately wanted to have such RISC CPUs in their own personal computers. They never really liked x86 design and they were used to work on UNIX workstations, so they didn’t even need any support for running Windows. However, although these CPUs were marketed as inexpensive, it was nearly impossible to build a computer based on them. You could only buy a complete UNIX workstation or a hi-end workstation-class mainboard with a lot of unnecessary features. There was no way to buy a reasonably priced basic mainboard.
At least that was the situation here in Central Europe. What was your experience? Was it different in your country?
TIGA is a strange beast. Texas Instrument’s TMS34020 (introduced in 1990) was the holy grail of 2D graphics acceleration for a certain period in the world of PCs. This chip is fully programable general purpose processor, so you can offload even non-graphics tasks to it (my low-cost SPEA Graphiti HiLite 1024 has 1MB of program/data memory in addition to 1MB of framebuffer memory). If you add a floating-point coprocessor (like Intel i860 or TMS34082), you can create a 3D accelerator that processes both rasterization and geometry processing.
On the other side, fixed-function graphics cards soon became cheaper and faster, which took the mass-market appeal away from TIGA. There were also multiple reasons, why TIGA was not a user-friendly standard. Unlike CGA, EGA and VGA, TIGA has a vendor specific part of the graphics driver. That means that you cannot just put a TIGA card in your computer and hope that programs or operating systems listing TIGA among supported graphics standards will work. That’s the reason why most TIGA collectors not even try if their cards are in a working condition.
This SPEA card (like many other TIGAs) is supported in DOS and Windows 3.x only. You need to configure the card (the configuration is stored in its EEPROM), initialize it during every boot using a vendor specific driver and load a generic TIGA library. Once all the steps are done, you can run any TIGA-enabled program.
This approach means that there cannot be any generic TIGA driver for UNIX, Linux, Windows NT and other operating systems that cannot work with drivers loaded from DOS. Windows 3.x has a generic TIGA driver and one can be installed also in Windows 95, but that’s all.
SPEA didn’t bank on the generic TIGA support in programs. They provided “direct” drivers for multiple DOS CAD programs (including AutoCAD) and Windows 3.1. These drivers work only on compatible SPEA cards and bypass all TIGA libraries. SPEA made them more performance optimized for CAD work. The Windows driver also offers an easy way to change resolution and color depth. Only 256-color (8-bit) and true color (32-bit) modes are supported, so my entry-level board with just 1MB of framebuffer memory can show millions of colors in resolutions no higher than 640×400.
(The first photo shows the SPEA card compared to a standard “dumb” ISA SVGA card. This SVGA card is one of the best choices from the early 90s thanks to its fast Tseng ET4000AX chip and 1MB of 32-bit video memory.)
